I was looking at trying Radius manager 3 http://www.dmasoftlab.com for Radius AAA/billing, I am interested in the Hotspot feature rather than PPPoE. I was reading through their FAQ located at [url]http://www.dmasoftlab.com/cont/faq[/url] and it states that StarOS hotspot feature is not supported. Has this changed in newer versions of StarOS? From what I gather it will work to authenticate users but will not disconnect users automatically because StarOS uses a lite version of chillispot. Can any one confirm this? I would like to be able to use a captive portal along with MAC auth for permanent users with the ability to automatically disconnect users when limits are met.

There are 10 types of people in the world who understand binary, those who do and those who don't.

I am thinking of evaluating this product. Did you ever set it up and what were your results? As for the disconnect, can that be handled in the timeout feature, for example if timeout is set to 900 sec, 15 minutes of idle time and they are gone.

molsen Wrote:I am thinking of evaluating this product. Did you ever set it up and what were your results? As for the disconnect, can that be handled in the timeout feature, for example if timeout is set to 900 sec, 15 minutes of idle time and they are gone.

I would like to use it with StarV3 and the hotspot script.

I tested about 1/2 a dozen differnet radius solutions with staros. Although free radius works excellent for whatever you want to do, I could not find any software that would intergrate a billing system into freeRadius that would fit our needs. Here is a C&P from my email I sent to them regaurding their software.

Quote:> Could you guys add attribute support for CoovaChilli. CoovaChilli uses> some of ChilliSpots attributes with some added WISPr attributes.

Coova doesn't send the real ip address of the NAS, instead it sends
127.0.0.1 and doesn't accept POD packet, so it is useless in our system. We
don't want to sell incomplete / unworkable systems.

Please do the tests. The system is working properly with Chillispot 1.1
running under Linux. This is the only working Chilli version. Anyway, Chilli
is a very primitive solution, slow and unstable.

You cannot add/remove radius attributes using their web interface which was another reason we kinda shyed away from it. Their dictionary is limited to [SIZE=2]Mikrotik / StarOS / ChilliSpot / Cisco. And not all of StarOS's stuff, just their PPPoE radius attributes. Look here at the bottom of the page [URL]http://www.dmasoftlab.com/cont/radman#comp[/URL].

The radius/billing solution we finally picked is Emerald5 http://www.iea-software.com/ which is pretty much infinantly configurable/scaleable to whatever you need it to do. It will run on Linux/Widows based systems. It is a little expensive but we figured the price of stamps and an automated billing system would justify the cost of about 2.00 USD per user you add to the system is a small price to pay. We chose the Emerald v5.0 Professional for around 3k USD which comes with 500 users and you can buy licenses for more users as you grow. Backup server which is JUST the radius part and not the Emerald (web management) is 1/2 the price. You can contact them for a free demo which is 45 days and they extended it once for us while we were testing. Custom radius attributes can be added through the web interface although you will find that it already has most Everything already in its dictionary.

A few things I would like to note. Out of all the radius servers I tested I could not get the WISPr-Bandwidth-Max-Up attribute to work with a bunch of 1.3.x versions of StarOS. It would simply not shape upload bw. I did try one of the early 1.4.x series with no joy either. Try the Radius Manager it might fit your needs. We chose emerald because we want something that works with whatever kind of hardware we use. Emerald team is pretty good to work with, if you need something specific, explain it to them and they will build a script/exe to fit your needs and add the functionality. For example: we wanted the customers to be able to pay by e-check in the sign-up part of the emerald server and they was willing to send us a script to add that functionality although we decided against it because of security issues that would arise. It also intergrates with a zillion different payment gateways, can set up office users that have specific permissions (customer sign up) etc. etc. etc..... If your interested just download it and evaluate its pretty good. Quite a learning curve with all the bells and whisles it provides.

[edit] Yes the disconnect POD can be worked around by setting session-timeout to maybe 12 or 24 hrs so that each user is required to re-auth every 12 to 24 so dissconnects could take that long.

Hope this info helps.
GOOD LUCK!
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There are 10 types of people in the world who understand binary, those who do and those who don't.

We found a similar thing. Didn't end up with Emerald as we didn't know of it. We ended up writing a good portion of our own backend to support our needs, especially for hotspots. It takes a while but we found it was a good opportunity to work out our brains and get a real good foundation with PHP and MySQL. If you have the time, it's worth it like anything DIY...